Category Archives: Dissertation

I mentioned that I sent off my paper last week. I am in process of writing the next chapter, but stalled a bit on some questions that I have about immortality. I have roughly ten pdfs open at the moment to be read and document. Add to this an extra trip to TEDS to hear Michael Allen speak, an eye exam, and taking a half day for my family, and last week wasn’t great for productivity.

I did send myself about twenty emails by text last week. I do this usually from the bathroom or from the church pew. For whatever reason the shower and the morning song time are fertile ground for ideas. I take in so many details that putting it together takes the mental tranquility required for creative leaps. Anyway, I have one pictured on the right. Here’s a rough idea of what I’m trying to say.

If someone wants to argue that Calvin has a Platonic view of the soul they will run into a few difficulties. First, he explicitly says that Aristotle is the shrewdest when it comes to the powers of the soul. He seems to accord a great deal of respect to Aristotle while rejecting him. Second, he does not hold Plato’s tripartite view of the soul and explicitly rejects Augustine’s. He holds a simple two faculty view. His soul seems to be somewhat Platonic (immortality and dualist with regard to body/soul) but mediated by a debate within a largely Aristotelian tradition that refined the faculties of intellect and will. Calvin is a humanist and biblical scholar who wants to avoid being pressed into more detail than he is comfortable with.

The other very productive thing I did last week was writing my ETS paper. I meant to write the proposal, but I hit “flow,” so I went with it. Three hours and 3,500 words later, I had something I can work with. I’ll submit the proposal this week.

Set Up

I’m hunkered down at Starbucks on 50th Street today (pictured: due for an upgrade). There are better atmospheres for work, but this is a regular stomping grounds because it is about a 3 minute drive. It’s one of those mornings where the weight of what I have to accomplish pushes away traveling very far.

The guy who looks like Bill Murray is here again today. He’s here about 75% of the mornings that I come here. He’s outside smoking at the moment, hence the two empty chairs pictured. I have formulated various theories to explain what he does here. He almost seems to be a well-to-do homeless man. He certainly is a recluse, preferring not to be spoken to. He sits, drinks his coffee, plays video games on his tablet, and sometimes scribbles notes on blank lined paper. Last week he dropped some, and when they came to rest by my feet tried to stoop to help him pick them up. He obviously did not want my help picking up his papers, scrambling to get them before I could. He remains a mystery.

Like this:

Well, I finished the chapter and sent it off. In the chapter, I was attempting to weave medieval background into a description of Calvin’s psychology as described in The Institutes I.15.1-8. I had run into so many difficulties trying to figure out how to arrange the background and my analysis of Calvin that, in the end, it was easiest just to cut Calvin out of the chapter. Once I had made this decision, the chapter seemed to write itself. I was done in less than a day. It came to 41 pages (roughly 14,000 words without footnotes–it would have been over 20,000 together). Part of the conclusion is below:

“In sum, there are very clear and broad historical reasons that Calvin’s psychology does not reflect the five distinctives of Aquinas’s psychology. Since we need to read him as he is situated, we can avoid blaming him for not answering questions that were not being asked and ascribing too much consequence to his way of organizing his psychology. The theological disputes that occurred between Aquinas and Calvin produced a general psychological inheritance for him, a core of four tendencies according to which, as we will see, his psychology generally conforms: (1) a tendency to hold a more dualistic approach to the body soul relation, which attributes the lower faculties to the body—owing both to the arguments over the identity of the soul and its powers and over the immortality of the soul (body/soul dualism), (2) a tendency to see the will and its passions as the morally relevant faculty, along with a corresponding tendency to see the passions of sense appetite as mere bodily passions, natural and irrational (ascendency of the will in action and affective theory), (3) a tendency to curtail the importance of virtue for the ethical life in action theory (mitigating the telos of divine command, flourishing; (curtailing of virtue in action theory), and (4) a tendency to see continence, rather than virtue as the maximal ethical state for persons (continence as highest ethical state). I have already remarked that the additional contribution of the Reformers is a tendency to overlay God’s volitional determinism on human psychological determinism as a way of minimizing the importance of human virtue. In the next chapter, I will lay out Calvin’s psychology in light of these four tendencies.

I’ve already emailed the chapter to Matthew Levering and received a quick email back with a promise to take a look. I’m hoping to interact with him about it, since it is very much in his wheelhouse. Most of the books consulted for this chapter were requested from the gorgeousFeehan Memorial Library at the University of St. Mary of the Lake where Levering teaches.

The uptake here is that the next chapter is also coming along nicely, since I removed the Calvin stuff and dumped it all into a file. It already has 7,500 words, and yesterday was a very productive day writing, sharpening some ideas I had already put on paper. I hope to be done with a draft of this chapter within two weeks.

The Set Up

I am back at TEDS today, scanning books and doing some tasks for the Trinity Journal. I’m currently about 91% done with Dombey and Sons by Charles Dickens; this is the last of the Dickens novels for me. So, I will have to be careful not to get drawn into it and stay on task. I had broken my headphones last week, and so, since headphones are indispensable to this work, I am rocking a new set of Klipsch S4i earbuds. I am a big fan.

The Plan

Scan two library books by Levering, which need to be returned to Feehan